The Experience of Canadian Muslim Civil-Society Organizations and Activists in Influencing and Shaping Counter-terrorism Legislation /

The focus of this research is not on the content or merits of the proposals in the legislation but on the process by which the legislation became law, and in particular the opportunities that the legislative process created for civil society, especially Muslim civil-society organisations and actors, to voice their support or opposition. [...] Critics of C-51 believed that the haste to pass the legislation was in part dictated by the impending general election; some suspected that the Conservative government, anticipating opposition to their proposals from the National Democratic Party and the Liberal Party, were rushing to pass the Bill in order to highlight opposition to the legislation during the election. [...] The impact of the broad range of civil-society groups opposing C-51 ‘culminated in a political environment that even the people who [were] not involved in that issue [were] beginning to feel, or hear about that criticism’.3 NDP politicians and supporters cited the evolution of the Liberal Party position in the run-up to the election, from supporting C-51 to seeking to amend it, as a sign of the im [...] The significance of procedural justice regarding the willingness of the public, or particular sections of the public, to cooperate with the authorities has been tested in the context of counter-terrorism policing in Australia, the UK and the US (Tyler, Schulhofer and Huq 2010; Huq, Tyler and Schulhofer 2011; Cherney and Murphy 2013; Madon, Murphy and Cherney 2016.). [...] TSAS: Choudhury, T. 20 Cherney and Murphy draw a distinction between ‘police legitimacy’ and ‘law legitimacy’; the former is the perceived legitimacy of the police officers enforcing the law, and the latter the ‘perceived legitimacy of the laws that are enforced by the police’.